“Be sure to use a strong password” is advice we all constantly see online. Here’s how to create a strong password — and, more importantly, how to actually remember it.

Using a password manager helps here, as it can create strong passwords and remember them for you. But, even if you use a password manager, you’ll at least need to create and a remember a password for your password manager.

Dealing with Passwords the Easy Way

With the plethora of websites that you probably have accounts for, there’s simply no way to easily remember every single password without duplicating them. This is where a password manager comes in — as long as you create a strong master password that you can remember, that’s the last password you’ll need to deal with.

There are a number of password managers, but Dashlane is probably the best choice for the average person. They have easy to use apps for every single platform, they integrate with every web browser, and it’s completely free to use the basic features. If you want to sync your passwords between different devices, you’ll need to upgrade to a premium account, but we recommend testing the free version out on your main computer first.

The security dashboard makes it easy to figure out how strong your passwords are

They have a ton of great features like a security dashboard, password changer, and a lot more. If you’re serious about security, you’ll make sure to use strong passwords everywhere, and the easiest way to manage them is a password manager like Dashlane.

The Traditional Password Advice

According to the traditional advice — which is still good — a strong password is:

Has 12 Characters, Minimum: You need to choose a password that’s long enough. There’s no minimum password length everyone agrees on, but you should generally go for passwords that are a minimum of 12 to 14 characters in length. A longer password would be even better.

Includes Numbers, Symbols, Capital Letters, and Lower-Case Letters: Use a mix of different types of characters to make the password harder to crack.

Isn’t a Dictionary Word or Combination of Dictionary Words: Stay away from obvious dictionary words and combinations of dictionary words. Any word on its own is bad. Any combination of a few words, especially if they’re obvious, is also bad. For example, “house” is a terrible password. “Red house” is also very bad.

Doesn’t Rely on Obvious Substitutions: Don’t use common substitutions, either — for example, “H0use” isn’t strong just because you’ve replaced an o with a 0. That’s just obvious.

Try to mix it up — for example, “BigHouse$123” fits many of the requirements here. It’s 12 characters and includes upper-case letters, lower-case letters, a symbol, and some numbers. But it’s fairly obvious — it’s a dictionary phrase where each word is capitalized properly. There’s only a single symbol, all the numbers are at the end, and they’re in an easy order to guess.

A Trick For Creating Memorable Passwords

With the tips above, it’s pretty easy to come up with a password. Just bash your fingers against your keyboard and you can come up with a strong password like 3o(t&gSp&3hZ4#t9. That’s a pretty good one — it’s 16 characters, includes a mix of many different types of characters, and is hard to guess because it’s a series of random characters.

The only problem here is memorizing this password. Assuming you don’t have a photographic memory, you’d have to spend time drilling these characters into your brain. There are random password generators that can come up with this type of password for you — they’re generally most useful as part of a password manager that will also remember them for you.

You’ll need to think about how to come up with a memorable password. You don’t want to use something obvious with dictionary characters, so consider using some sort of trick to memorize it.

For example, maybe you can find it easy to remember a sentence like “The first house I ever lived in was 613 Fake Street. Rent was $400 per month.” You can then turn that into a password by using the first digits of each word, so your password would become TfhIeliw613FS.Rw$4pm. This is a strong password at 21 digits. Sure, a true random password might include a few more numbers and symbols and upper-case letters scrambled around, but it’s not bad at all. You just need to remember two simple sentences, so it’s easy to remember.